Finale (1976)

I worship the ground he walks on. I wish there was a way for me to let you know that cliché was blurted into language, that an impulse I could not control just grabbed those words to get it out.

I wish I could type something that would immediately detail my love’s massive extent and indicate what love’s crippling effect on language has reduced or enlarged me to.

It definitely feels like I’m enlarged, but my thing for language hasn’t come along yet. I’m too in love with him to talk coherently about it.

I love him so much that I’m nothing but that. Everything else I feel and do is like a habit or a doomed revolution.

I would literally declare everywhere he steps to be a sacred site by means and powers I don’t know or have if there wasn’t so much trodden ground already, and if I owned the footsteps’ rights and weren’t so busily in love with all the rest of him.

If he stood somewhere long enough to leave an imprint of his shoes, and if I saw the dents, I would want to hire an architect to do something visionary with them until I thought about a greater and even less constructive way to honor him.

Reality is so controlling, and I’ve never tried to stay there when I write before. This is the first time in my life that someone in the world has made me want to undermine my fiction when it frees me to forget the world and to seduce or fuck or murder or be loved by him or anyone I want.

I’ve never written fiction like I think and talk and feel before. I’m not sure why I believe that being willfully vulnerable and the verbiage that might result are a tribute to him or why I’m willing to bet this will talk to you.

It’s a lot to ask since what I feel is not something I can capture, other than to say, Look, I’m another writer who is obviously in love and who has lost my way linguistically. How do I make you care, since no one cares that much about another’s love.

I want to use my love as a perspective that will turn my writing into his devotee and insider and turn you into his, I don’t know, admirers maybe. At the same time, I’m writing this for him, to him, no one else, and you’re my, I don’t know, imaginary witnesses.

You want literary kicks, and I realize that for you he’s circumstantial. He’ll work for you or won’t. You’re there to be convinced and help me prove my love is not meaningless to him. If I can sway you, and if he thinks I did, he’ll know how incredibly I love him, if that matters to him, and if he doesn’t know already.

This is a novel that only wants to really, really matter to him in the hope that, if it does, that’ll mean he loves me too because he’ll know I could do anything I want right now, and I wrote this.

I worship the flowing lava and whatever else a billion years ago that eventually formed the ground he walks on.